IRELAND SHAKESPEARE FORGERY/LEGAL King Lear/Hamlet 1796 FOLIO VRY SCARCE LTD 1st1 OF ONLY 138 COPIES SURVIVED~THIS IS ONE OF THEM
EXCEEDINGLY SCARCE FOLIO EDITION OF \"MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS AND LEGAL INSTRUMENTS UNDER THE HAND AND SEAL OF WILLIAMSHAKESPEARE: Including the Tragedy of King Lear, an a Small Fragment of Hamlet, from the Original MSS. In the Possession ofSamuel Ireland of Norfolk Street\" BY WILLIAM HENRY IRELAND PRINTED IN LONDON BY COOPER AND GRAHAM FOR MR. EGERTON IN LONDON, 1796. This is a priceless and very historic treatise on the Shakespeare forgeries in its original form. We were unable to find another one in the folio edition for this year and is a presumed first edition. It was written in the winter of 1795 and first published in a folio edition in 1796 and later produced the more common octavo edition. This folio edition is one of 368 copies.
“Of the 368 copies printedonly 138 survived, including 122 to subscribers, some half-dozen as gifts, and the remainder to the State Libraries. The forger’s youngest sister supervised the desctruction of the copperplates and the rending into waste paper the other 230 copies.”—Jaggard page 164.
The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries were a cause célèbre in 1790s London, when author and engraver Samuel Ireland announced the discovery of a treasure-trove of Shakespearean manuscripts by his son William Henry Ireland. Among them were the manuscripts of four plays, two of them previously unknown. Such respected literary figures as James Boswell (biographer of Samuel Johnson) and poet-laureate Henry James Pye pronounced them genuine, as did various antiquarian experts. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the leading theatre manager of his day, agreed to present one of the newly discovered plays with John Philip Kemble in the starring rôle. Excitement over the biographical and literary significance of the find turned to acrimony when it was charged that the documents were forgeries. Edmond Malone, the greatest Shakespeare scholar of his time, showed conclusively that the language, orthography, and handwriting were not those of the times and persons to which they were credited, and William Henry Ireland, the supposed discoverer, confessed to the fraud.
THE STORY
\"In the winter of 1795 a young, talented and cheeky man named William-Henry Ireland signed the bottom of a tattered piece of paper \"Wm Shakespeare.\" It was the first of hundreds of notes, poems and plays that Ireland forged and passed off as William Shakespeare originals.The world was so desperate to read more of the Bard\'s work that the trick actually worked — for a time.In The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare, author Doug Stewart recounts the rise, fall and daddy issues of William-Henry Ireland.
Did It For Dad?Stewart tells NPR\'s Guy Raz that William-Henry Ireland wanted to impress his pompous, emotionally chilly father, Samuel Ireland. So, knowing his father was a collector who more than anything wanted to own something signed by Shakespeare, William-Henry Ireland brought him his forgery — a deed he had written on an old piece of parchment using watered-down ink to make it look old — which he claimed to have found in the mansion of a wealthy friend.After having a friend look at the deed and the particularly convincing seal William-Henry Ireland had placed on it, Samuel Ireland was convinced his son had given him a genuine Shakespeare artifact.\"It\'s important to understand that there had been a nationwide manhunt to find these papers,\" Stewart says. \"So when the boy said, \'I found them,\' instead of being astounded, people\'s reaction was, \'Oh good. We were looking for those. It\'s about time.’\"
The Fall Of William-HenryWhen Samuel Ireland decided the deed and other papers his son produced should be published, he marked the beginning of the end of William-Henry and his hoax.\"Once the papers were printed, it gave everyone a chance to see engraved facsimiles of all these works in bright sunlight, if they wanted to, and to really study them and see the quality of the work,\" Stewart says.Devoted Shakespeare fans had doubts about the poems the Irelands published and whether they had truly come from the Bard. Still, it wasn\'t until William-Henry Ireland \"unearthed\" the lost Shakespeare play Vortigern that everything came crashing down.\"If you read it,\" Stewart says, \"there are passages that seem fairly plausible: \'Fortune, I thank thee, now is the cup of my ambition full,\' and so on and so forth.\"Those passages were, in fact, plausible enough for a London theater to decide to put on the production. It didn\'t matter that the owner of the theater wasn\'t entirely convinced by the play — not that he doubted its validity so much as he believed Shakespeare had been quite young when he wrote it. What did matter was that the sensation surrounding the play and the claim that he was putting on the first Shakespeare premiere in 200 years would fill the house night after night, week after week.\"Historians later wrote that it was booed off the stage, which really is not true,\" Stewart says. \"Many people in attendance were there to denounce this play as a forgery, but many other people arrived believing they were witnessing a Shakespeare premiere.\"Still, the play\'s run lasted only one night. After that, William-Henry Ireland finally delivered his proud confession.\"If you read the confession, he\'s not contrite in the slightest,\" Stewart says. \"It\'s more of a boast. He\'s saying, \'I wrote these papers — me — these papers that have been praised by critics.\' And many people, seeing the confession, refused to believe him. They thought he was claiming credit for something that somebody else had done.\"Cheaters Never WinWilliam-Henry Ireland had two motives when he decided to hustle the literary world — to help launch his own literary career and to win the respect and admiration of his father. On both counts he was sadly disappointed. Without the restriction of trying to imitate Shakespeare, William-Henry Ireland\'s writing was pretty bad — overwritten and full of purple prose, Stewart says. And, in the end, not even his own father believed him capable of pulling off such a successfully elaborate hoax[npr.org].\"
SCARCE FOLIO REMAINS IN GOOD CONDITION.Beautiful and original 3/4 leather with marble boards with a decorative gilt spine. Contains 20 Full page plates and some facsimiles (some colored); 6 engravings within text. [4], [2], [52], 107, [I], 7 pages (subscribers listmis-bound near the front). Pages are overall very clean with some random foxing and some minor marginal staining, tight, appears to be complete according toindex. Binding contains moderate wear with some chipping, pumping to corners, etc. The book as a whole is tight and generally in good collectible conditon. Chances of finding another would be quit challenging in one piece. Volumes measures aprox 17.25 by 13.25 inches.
NEVER A RESERVE AND (VERY) LOW OPENING offer AS ALWAYS.Please review our response and offer with confidence. Buyer pays calculated cost USPS Media Mail within USA and calculated cost internationally. Feel free to contact me if you would like shipping insurance within the USA. Insurance not offered on international parcels. Due to PayPals buyer protection policy, I can only ship USPSPriority for International buyers. Connecticut residents please add 6.35% sales tax or dealers include your tax resale number. Paypal is only accepted due to s new policy. Payment must be received within 10 days after close of sale. Thanks for your interest, Good Luck.
_gsrx_vers_603 (GS 6.9 (603)) var itemNumber = window.ItemID ? window.ItemID : -1; function passpara(){return + itemNumber + \'&baseurl=\'+escape((function(){var d = return d })());}
rarebookman Store
function passparaSC(){return \'&baseurl=\'+ escape((function(){var d = return d })()) +
